by Ayn Rand
Ringg said, “Who’d dare? It would be reported.”
Bart knew, with a cold chill, that the missing Klanerol had not simply gone “on the drift.” No Lhari port would ever see Klanerol, Second Class Astrogator, again.
“Bartol,” mused the captain, riffling the forged papers. “Served on the Polaris run. Hm—you are a good long way off your orbit, aren’t you? Never been out that way myself. All right, I’ll take you on. You can do system programming? Good. Rating in Second Galaxy mathematics?”
He nodded, hauled out a sheet of thin, wax-coated fabric and his claws made rapid imprints in the surface. He passed it to Bart, pointed. Bart hesitated, and Vorongil said impatiently, “Standard agreement, no hidden clauses. Put your mark on it, feathertop.”
Bart realized it was something like a fingerprint they wanted. You’ll pass anything but X-rays. He pressed the top of one claw into the wax. Vorongil nodded, shoved it on a shelf without looking at it.
“So much for that,” said Ringg, laughing, as they came out. “The Bald One was in a good temper. I’m going to the port and celebrate, not that this dim place is very festive. You?”
“I—I think I’ll stay aboard.”
“Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be down there somewhere,” Ringg said. “See you later, shipmate.” He raised his closed fist in farewell, and went.
Bart stood in the corridor, feeling astounded and strange. He belonged here! He had a right to be on board the ship! He wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
A Lhari, as short and fat as a Lhari could possibly be and still be a Lhari, came or rather waddled out of the captain’s office. He saw Bartol and called, “Are you the new First Class? I’m Rugel, coordinator.”
Rugel had a huge cleft darkish scar across his lip, and there were two bands on his cloak. He was completely bald, and he puffed when he walked. “Vorongil asked me to show you around. You’ll share quarters with Ringg—no sense shifting another man. Come down and see the chart rooms—or do you want to leave your kit in your cabin first?”
“I don’t have much,” Bart said.
Rugel’s seamed lip widened. “That’s the way—travel light when you’re on the drift,” he confirmed.
Rugel took him down to the drive rooms, and here for a moment, in wonder and awe, Bart almost forgot his disguise. The old Lhari led him to the huge computer which filled one wall of the room, and Bart was smitten with the universality of mathematics. Here was something he knew he could handle.
He could do this programming, easily enough. But as he stood before the banks of complex, yet beautifully familiar levers, the sheer exquisite complexity of it overcame him. To compute the movements of thousands of stars, all moving at different speeds in different directions in the vast swirling directionless chaos of the Universe—and yet to be sure that every separate movement would come out to within a quarter of a mile! It was something that no finite brain—man or Lhari—could ever accomplish, yet their limited brains had built these computers that could do it.
Rugel watched him, laughing softly. “Well, you’ll have enough time down here. I like to have youngsters who are still in the middle of a love affair with their work. Come along, and I’ll show you your cabin.”
Rugel left him in a cabin amidships; small and cramped, but tidy, two of the oval bunks slung at opposite ends, a small table between them, and drawers filled with pamphlets and manuals and maps. Furtively, ashamed of himself, yet driven by necessity, Bart searched Ringg’s belongings, wanting to get some idea of what possessions he ought to own. He looked around the shower and toilet facilities with extra care—this was something he couldn’t slip up on and be considered even halfway normal. He was afraid Ringg would come in, and see him staring curiously at something as ordinary, to a Lhari, as a cake of soap.
He decided to go down to the port again and look around the shops. He was not afraid of being unable to handle his work. What he feared was something subtler—that the small items of everyday living, something as simple as a nail file, would betray him.
On his way he looked into the Recreation Lounge, filled with comfortable seats, vision-screens, and what looked like simple pinball machines and mechanical games of skill. There were also stacks of tapereels and headsets for listening, not unlike those humans used. Bart felt fascinated, and wanted to explore, but decided he could do that later.
Somehow he took the wrong turn coming out of the Recreation Lounge, and went through a door where the sudden dimming of lights told him he was in Mentorian quarters. The sudden darkness made him stumble, thrust out his hands to keep from falling, and an unmistakably human voice said, “Ouch!”
“I’m sorry,” Bart said in Universal, without thinking.
“I admit the lights are dim,” said the voice tartly, and Bart found himself looking down, as his eyes adjusted to the new light level, at a girl.
She was small and slight, in a metallic blue cloak that swept out, like wings, around her thin shoulders; the hood framed a small, kittenlike face. She was a Mentorian, and she was human, and Bart’s eyes rested with comfort on her face; she, on the other hand, was looking up with anxiety and uneasy distrust. That’s right—I’m a Lhari, a nonhuman freak!
“I seem to have missed my way.”
“What are you looking for, sir? The medical quarters are through here.”
“I’m looking for the elevator down to the crew exits.”
“Through here,” she said, reopening the door through which he had come, and shading her large, lovely, long-lashed eyes with a slender hand. “You took the wrong turn. Are you new on board? I thought all ships were laid out exactly alike.”
“I’ve only worked on passenger ships.”
“I believe they are somewhat different,” said the girl in good Lhari. “Well, that is your way, sir.”
He felt as if he had been snubbed and dismissed.
“What is your name?”
She stiffened as if about to salute. “Meta of the house of Marnay Three, sir.”
Bart realized he was doing something wholly out of character for a Lhari—chatting casually with a Mentorian. With a wistful glance at the pretty girl, he said a stiff “Thank you” and went down the ramp she had indicated. He felt horribly lonely. Being a freak wasn’t going to be much fun.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He saw the girl again next day, when they checked in for blastoff. She was seated at a small desk, triangular like so much of the Lhari furniture, checking a register as they came out of the Decontam room, making sure they downed their greenish solution of microorganisms.
“Papers, please?” She marked, and Bart noticed that she was using a red pencil.
“Bartol,” she said aloud. “Is that how you pronounce it?” She made small scribbles in a sort of shorthand with the red pencil, then made other marks with the black one in Lhari; he supposed the red marks were her own private memoranda, unreadable by the Lhari.
“Next, please.” She handed a cup of the greenish stuff to Ringg, behind him. Bart went down toward the drive room, and to his own surprise, found himself wishing the girl were a mathematician rather than a medic. It would have been pleasant to watch her down there.
Old Rugel, on duty in the drive room, watched Bart strap himself in before the computer. “Make sure you check all dials at null,” he reminded him, and Bart felt a last surge of panic.
This was his first cruise, except for practice runs at the Academy! Yet his rating called him an experienced man on the Polaris run. He’d had the Lhari training tape, which was supposed to condition his responses, but would it? He tried to clench his fists, drove a claw into his palm, winced, and commanded himself to stay calm and keep his mind on what he was doing.
It calmed him to make the routine check of his dials.
“Strapdown check,” said a Lhari with a yellowed crest and a rasping voice. “New man, eh?” He gave Bart’s straps perfunctory tugs at shoulders and waist, tightened a buckle. “Karol son of Garin.”
Bells rang in the ship, and Bart felt the odd, tonic touch of fear. This was it.
Vorongil strode through the door, his banded cloak sweeping behind him, and took the control couch.
“Ready from fueling room, sir.”
“Position,” Vorongil snapped.
Bart heard himself reading off a string of figures in Lhari. His voice sounded perfectly calm.
“Communication.”
“Clear channels from Pylon Dispatch, sir.” It was old Rugel’s voice.
“Well,” Vorongil said, slowly and almost reflectively, “let’s take her up then.”
He touched some controls. The humming grew. Then, swift, hard and crushing, weight mashed Bart against his couch.
“Position!” Vorongil’s voice sounded harsh, and Bart fought the crushing weight of it. Even his eyeballs ached as he struggled to turn the tiny eye muscles from dial to dial, and his voice was a dim croak: “Fourteen seven sidereal twelve point one one four nine....”
“Hold it to point one one four six,” Vorongil said calmly.
“Point one one four six,” Bart said, and his claws stabbed at dials. Suddenly, in spite of the cold weight on his chest, the pain, the struggle, he felt as if he were floating. He managed a long, luxurious breath. He could handle it. He knew what he was doing.
He was an Astrogator....
Later, when Acceleration One had reached its apex and the artificial gravity made the ship a place of comfort again, he went down to the dining hall with Ringg and met the crew of the Swiftwing. There were twelve officers and twelve crewmen of various ratings like himself and Ringg, but there seemed to be little social division between them, as there would have been on a human ship; officers and crew joked and argued without formality of any kind.
None of them gave him a second look. Later, in the Recreation Lounge, Ringg challenged him to a game with one of the pinball machines. It seemed fairly simple to Bart; he tried it, and to his own surprise, won.
Old Rugel touched a lever at the side of the room. With a tiny whishing sound, shutters opened, the light of Procyon Alpha flooded them and he looked out through a great viewport into bottomless space.
Procyon Alpha, Beta and Gamma hung at full, rings gently tilted. Beyond them the stars burned, flaming through the shimmers of cosmic dust. The colors, the never-ending colors of space!
And he stood here, in a room full of monsters—he was one of the monsters—
“Which one of the planets was it we stopped on?” Rugel asked. “I can’t tell ‘em apart from this distance.”
Bartol swallowed; he had almost said the blue one. He pointed. “The—the big one there, with the rings almost edge-on. I think they call it Alpha.”
“It’s their planet,” said Rugel. “I guess they can call it what they want to. How about another game?”
Resolutely, Bart turned his back on the bewitching colors, and bent over the pinball machine.
* * *
The first week in space was a nightmare of strain. He welcomed the hours on watch in the drive room; there alone he was sure of what he was doing. Everywhere else in the ship he was perpetually scared, perpetually on tiptoe, perpetually afraid of making some small and stupid mistake. Once he actually called Aldebaran a red star, but Rugel either did not hear the slip or thought he was repeating what one of the Mentorians—there were two aboard besides the girl—had said.
The absence of color from speech and life was the hardest thing to get used to. Every star in the manual was listed by light-frequency waves, to be checked against a photometer for a specific reading, and it almost drove Bart mad to go through the ritual when the Mentorians were off duty and could not call off the color and the equivalent frequency type for him. Yet he did not dare skip a single step, or someone might have guessed that he could see the difference between a yellow and a green star before checking them.
The Academy ships had had the traditional human signal system of flashing red lights. Bart was stretched taut all the time, listening for the small codelike buzzers and ticks that warned him of filled tanks, leads in need of servicing, answers ready. Ringg’s metal-fatigues testing kit was a bewildering muddle of boxes, meters, rods and earphones, each buzzing and clicking its characteristic warning.
At first he felt stretched to capacity every waking moment, his memory aching with a million details, and lay awake nights thinking his mind would crack under the strain. Then Alpha faded to a dim bluish shimmer, Beta was eclipsed, Gamma was gone, Procyon dimmed to a failing spark; and suddenly Bart’s memory accustomed itself to the load, the new habits were firmly in place, and he found himself eating, sleeping and working in a settled routine.
He belonged to the Swiftwing now.
Procyon was almost lost in the viewports when a sort of upswept tempo began to run through the ship, an undercurrent of increased activity. Cargo was checked, inventoried and strapped in. Ringg was given four extra men to help him, made an extra tour of the ship, and came back buzzing like a frantic cricket. Bart’s computers told him they were forging toward the sidereal location assigned for the first of the warp-drive shifts, which would take them some fifteen light-years toward Aldebaran.
On the final watch before the warp-drive shift, the medical officer came around and relieved the Mentorians from duty. Bart watched them go, with a curious, cold, crawling apprehension. Even the Mentorians, trusted by the Lhari—even these were put into cold-sleep! Fear grabbed his insides.
No human had ever survived the shift into warp-drive, the Lhari said. Briscoe, his father, Raynor Three—they thought they had proved that the Lhari lied. If they were right, if it was a Lhari trick to reinforce their stranglehold on the human worlds and keep the warp-drive for themselves, then Bart had nothing to fear. But he was afraid.
Why did the Mentorians endure this, never quite trusted, isolated among aliens?
Raynor Three had said, Because I belong in space, because I’m never happy anywhere else. Bart looked out the viewport at the swirl and burn of the colors there. Now that he could never speak of the colors, it seemed he had never been so wholly and wistfully aware of them. They symbolized the thing he could never put into words.
So that everyone can have this. Not just the Lhari.
Rugel watched the Mentorians go, scowling. “I wish medic would find a way to keep them alive through warp,” he said. “My Mentorian assistant could watch that frequency-shift as we got near the bottom of the arc, and I’ll bet she could see it. They can see the changes in intensity faster than I can plot them on the photometer!”
Bart felt goosebumps break out on his skin. Rugel spoke as if the certain death of humans, Mentorians, was a fact. Didn’t the Lhari themselves know it was a farce? Or was it?
Vorongil himself took the controls for the surge of Acceleration Two, which would take them past the Light Barrier. Bart, watching his instruments to exact position and time, saw the colors of each star shift strangely, moment by moment. The red stars seemed hard to see. The orange-yellow ones burned suddenly like flame; the green ones seemed golden, the blue ones almost green. Dimly, he remembered the old story of a “red shift” in the lights of approaching stars, but here he saw it pure, a sight no human eyes had ever seen. A sight that no eyes had seen, human or otherwise, for the Lhari could not see it....
“Time,” he said briefly to Vorongil, “Fifteen seconds....”
Rugel looked across from his couch. Bart felt that the old, scarred Lhari could read his fear. Rugel said through a wheeze, “No matter how old you get, Bartol, you’re still scared when you make a warp-shift. But relax, computers don’t make mistakes.”
“Catalyst,” Vorongil snapped, “Ready—shift!“
At first there was no change; then Bart realized that the stars, through the viewport, had altered abruptly in size and shade and color. They were not sparks but strange streaks, like comets, crossing and recrossing long tails that grew, longer and longer, moment by moment. The dark night of space was filled with a crisscrossing blaze. Th
ey were moving faster than light, they saw the light left by the moving Universe as each star hurled in its own invisible orbit, while they tore incredibly through it, faster than light itself....
Bart felt a curious, tingling discomfort, deep in his flesh; almost an itching, a stinging in his very bones.
Lhari flesh is no different from ours....
Space, through the viewport, was no longer space as he had come to know it, but a strange eerie limbo, the star-tracks lengthening, shifting color until they filled the whole viewport with shimmering, gray, recrossing light. The unbelievable reaction of warp-drive thrust them through space faster than the lights of the surrounding stars, faster than imagination could follow.
The lights in the drive chamber began to dim—or was he blacking out? The stinging in his flesh was a clawed pain.
Briscoe lived through it....
They say.
The whirling star-tracks fogged, coiled, turned colorless worms of light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart felt only numb, regretful failure. I’ve failed, we’ll always fail. The Lhari were right all long.
But we tried! By God, we tried!
“Bartol?” A gentle hand, cat claws retracted, came down on his shoulder. Ringg bent over him. Good-natured rebuke was in his voice. “Why didn’t you tell us you got a bad reaction, and ask to sign out for this shift?” he demanded. “Look, poor old Rugel’s passed out again. He just won’t admit he can’t take it—but one idiot on a watch is enough! Some people just feel as if the bottom’s dropped out of the ship, and that’s all there is to it.”
Bart hauled his head upright, fighting a surge of stinging nausea. His bones itched inside and he was damnably uncomfortable, but he was alive.
“I’m—fine.”
“You look it,” Ringg said in derision. “Think you can help me get Rugel to his cabin?”
